Prostitution

Abstract

Abstract The ‘oldest profession’ underwent a similar ‘medicalization’ in the nineteenth century. Prostitution had always been associated with moral depravity and with poverty, but it fell increasingly under medical surveillance as political elites became concerned about the health of male populations weakened by venereal disease. In Italy and France and some German towns, official regulatory regimes were created that isolated prostitutes in ‘dosed houses’ and subjected them to regular medical inspection. Britain experimented with a similar regula tory regime between 1864 and 1886 by passing and enforcing the Contagious Diseases Acts. Under the Act women could be labelled ‘common prostitutes’ and confined to ‘lock’ hospitals to undergo treatment for venereal disease. Women forced into prostitution from sheer poverty thus found themselves marginalized as a class, and, despite their resistance to the medical stereotypes devised to describe them, found it difficult as individuals to escape stigmatiza tion, as Extracts 59 and 6o explain.